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We interviewed John R. Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center which compiles data on gun permits in states. Lott, an academic and Fox News columnist, published the book More Guns, Less Crime through the University of Chicago in 2010.

He said there are four factors that influence the number of gun permits in a state: the amount of fees, hours of required training, how many places people can or can’t carry their firearms and how many years the rules have been in effect.

. . . . These tactics are a way for police departments or the government to make it more costly to own guns, said John Lott, an economist, leading expert on guns, and author at the Crime Prevention Research Center. Lott believes the illegal policies most hurt poor gun owners, who not only are less likely to afford to get their property back, but also typically live in neighborhoods where they are more vulnerable to crime.

. . . The biggest change in production has come under President Obama. From 2001 to 2007, gun production held steady at between 3 million and 4 million units a year. It topped 4 million in 2008 but shot to 5.6 million in 2009, held steady in 2010 and then spiked to 8.6 million guns in 2012 and a record 10.8 million in 2013, according to ATF data.

The Fox News story is available here. If you are interested in reading our original report that will be published this week in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today, please download it here. Right now the coverage of our report is at the very top of the Fox News website.…

. . . The move toward “shall-issue” accelerated in the mid-1980s. Florida became a shall-issue state in 1987, and now has 1.3 million concealed carry permit holders – roughly 10 percent of the national number, according to John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center, a pro-gun research group in Washington, D.C.

Is gun ownership falling? The answer is yes, at least if you believe a new General Social Survey (GSS) by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC). Supposedly, since the late 1970s, the percentage of homes with a gun has fallen from approximately 50 percent to 32 percent.

A video of the first panel testifying on the bill to reduce the number of gun-free zones in Nevada is available below (Lott’s testimony starts at 5:54 into the video below). Since the first panel went through a lot of the facts regarding guns and schools as well as mass public shootings, the opponents of the bill were put in a difficult position. …